Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups

By Becker Riccardo

This book follows a step-by-step approach with clear transparent instructions, screenshots and code samples. This book is intended for Microsoft .NET developers who want to leverage the power of cloud and build a brand new service from scratch; it assumes a basic understanding of the .NET framework and C#.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: Oct 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781849685610

Book preview

Table of Contents

Windows Azure Programming Patterns for Start-ups

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Free Access for Packt account holders

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. The Concepts of Windows Azure

Red Dog

Windows Azure announcement

A quick start on Windows Azure

How it works internally

First steps

Creating and deploying a website on Windows Azure

First deployment

Upgrade domains

Fault domains

Fabric Controller

Internals of a node

Deployment steps

Core components of Windows Azure

Compute

Web roles

Worker roles

Virtual machine roles

Database

SQL Database

Data Sync

Storage

Binary Large Object

Table Storage

Queue

Windows Azure drive

Business analytics

Service Bus

Content delivery network

Caching

Virtual network

Windows Azure Connect

Windows Azure Traffic Manager

Windows Azure Active Directory

Marketplace

Summary

2. A Startup Scenario

Introduction

BizSpark

Program roles

Enrolling into the program

Geotopia's goals

Geotopia prototype

TFS in the cloud

Connecting to TFS Preview

Querying Tasks

Summary

3. Create Your Solution

Solution structure

Organizing a solution in VS 2010

Compute and storage emulators

Bing Maps

Adding Silverlight to cloud

Embedding Bing Maps

Setting up TFS preview

Connecting with TFS Preview

Publishing to Windows Azure

Summary

4. Storing Your Data

Storage

What is Windows Azure storage?

Blobs

Table storage

Queues

Inside storage

Storage architecture

Storage availability

Fault domains

Upgrade domains

Replication

Partitioning

Storage metrics

Table storage usage

A closer look at tables

Choose the right key

Keys for scaling

Keys for transactions

Geotopia data model

Adding an entity

Querying

Continuation tokens

Best practices

Table storage summary

Queue usage

A closer look at the queue

Creating a queue

Inserting a message

Retrieving a message

Queue operations

Idempotency

Using blobs

File transfer

Uploading a file

Downloading the file

Storage best practices

Use exponential backoff

Summary

5. SQL Database

Overview

Setting up SQL databases

Guidelines

Best practices

Encryption and security

Encryption demo

Data Sync

Supported datatypes in Data Sync

Securing Data Sync

Authentication

Setting up a Data Sync environment

Summary

6. Key Features Explained

Service Bus

Getting started

Queues

Working with queues

A sample scenario

Preparing the project

Sending messages

Receiving messages

Cross-domain communication

Comparison

Background information

Topics and subscriptions

Preparing the project

Using filters

Windows Azure Caching

Caching capabilities

Setting it up

Caching examples

Adding items to the cache

Session state and output caching

Windows Azure Connect

Setting it up

Enabling a web role with Connect

Managing Connect

Testing connectivity

Other Connect capabilities

Access Control Service

Getting started

Adding an identity provider

Adding a relying party

Application integration

Integrating with Facebook

Using FederatedAuthentication

Displaying information about me

Traffic Manager

Setting it up

Round robin

Performance

Failover

Testing the policies

Failover scenario

Summary

7. The Billing Aspects of Windows Azure

Basic billing details

Compute

Windows Azure SQL databases

Storage

Bandwidth

Content delivery network

Cache

Service Bus

Access Control Service

Pricing

Calculator

Purchase options

Member offers

MSDN subscribers

MPN members

Cloud Essentials

Cloud Accelerate

BizSpark members

How much we use

Bandwidth

What is counted as a transaction

How to reduce the number of transactions

When are transactions billed

Estimate capacity

Implementing your own billing tracker

Enabling analytics

Request logging

Example transactions

Blob capacity

Summary

8. Windows Azure Patterns

Enterprise Library for Windows Azure

EntLib and Azure compatibility

EntLib Integration Pack

Autoscaling

Transient fault handling

Blob configuration

PowerShell Cmdlets

Protected configuration provider

Windows Azure autoscaling

Growth model

Applying WASABi

Key concepts of WASABi

Configure autoscaling

Worker host

Setting rules

Constraint rules

Reactive rules

Throttling

Service information store

Metronome

Data collection

Data points store

Rule evaluation

Conflicting rules

The scaler

The tracker

The stabilizer

Customizing WASABi

Blob configuration

PowerShell cmdlets

Transient fault handling

The Transient Fault Handling Application Block

Applying transient fault handling

The Gatekeeper pattern

The KeyMaster

Summary

9. Application Lifecycle Management

ALM overview

Governance

Development

Operations

ALM tooling

Planning and tracking

Writing, unit testing, debugging, analyzing, and profiling

Build

Defining a Build

Queue build

Review build

Application Lifecycle Management on Windows Azure

Step 1: Team development

Step 2: Build, Unit test, Deploy, UItest flow, and manual test

Step 3: Release drop

Step 4: Operations

Summary

10. Windows Azure Security

Security development lifecycle

Security roles

Security maturity

Security activities

Training

Requirements

Design

Implementation

Verification

Release

SDL in Windows Azure

Requirements

Design

Implementation

Verification

Release

Microsoft Global Foundation Services

Certifications

Privacy

Platform security

Adding more security

Summary

11. What's New in Windows Azure

Overview

Virtual machines

Creating a virtual machine

Connecting to the VM

Setting up a VHD

Virtual network

Creating a virtual network

Management portal

Media services

Setting it up

Using media services

An example displaying the use of media services

Uploading

Converting

Iterating

Downloading

Summary

Index

Windows Azure Programming Patterns for Start-ups

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Windows Azure Programming Patterns for Start-ups

Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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First published: October 2012

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Credits

Author

Riccardo Becker

Reviewers

Michael Collier

Neil Mackenzie

Acquisition Editor

Dilip Venkatesh

Lead Technical Editor

Unnati Shah

Technical Editors

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Cover Work

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About the Author

Riccardo Becker works full-time as a Principal IT Architect for Logica, in the Netherlands. He holds several certifications, and his background in computing goes way back to 1998, when he started working with good old' Visual Basic 5.0 (or was it 6.0?). Ever since, he fulfilled several roles, such as Developer, Lead Developer, Architect, Project Leader, Practice Manager, and recently, he decided to accept the role of Principal IT Architect, in which he focuses on innovation, cutting-edge technology, and specifically on Windows Azure and cloud computing in general.

In 2007, he joined the Microsoft LEAP program, where he got a peek at the move Microsoft was about to make on their road to the cloud. Pat Helland gave him that insight, and since the first release of Windows Azure on PDC 2008, he started to focus on it, keeping track of the progress and the maturity of the platform. In the past few years, he has also done a lot of work on incubation with his employer, raising awareness on cloud computing in general and Windows Azure.

I would like to thank all my colleagues who were counterparts with me on various subjects in the world of Azure. Special thanks to my dear colleague and friend, Raymond Binnendijk en Rémon ter 
Haar, who helped me out throughout the whole project.



I also would like to thank the folks from Packt Publishing, especially Sai Gamare, who helped me keep on track and on schedule, despite some obstacles and some changes that I made to the original outline.



Special thanks to my employer Logica for all the opportunities that have helped me in realizing this book. It is thanks to the daily job and to getting the opportunity to focus on these subjects that I have come to this point of having enough substance to write this book.

About the Reviewers

Michael Collier is a Windows Azure MVP and serves as a National Architect for a Microsoft SI partner that specializes in Windows Azure. He has nearly 11 years of experience building Microsoft-based applications for a wide range of clients. Michael spends his days serving as a developer or architect, helping clients succeed with the Microsoft development platform. He also enjoys speaking about Windows Azure at local user groups as well as at regional and national conferences. Michael is also the founder of CloudDevelop as well as of the Central Ohio Cloud Computing User Group in Columbus, OH. You can follow Michael on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MichaelCollier and on his blog at www.MichaelSCollier.com.

Neil Mackenzie has been kicking the tires of Windows Azure since PDC 2008. He works for Satory Global, helping companies use the Windows Azure platform. Neil wrote the Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook for Packt Publishing. He is a Microsoft MVP for Windows Azure. Neil tweets occasionally on @mknz.

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Preface

Windows Azure was officially announced at PDC 2008, but looking back, I had a quick look in the kitchen of Windows Azure in 2007 while I was visiting Redmond during the Lead Enterprise Architect Program (LEAP) sessions. Pat Helland, a senior architect at Microsoft, gave a talk on The irresistible forces meet the movable objects.

Pat described the nature of the forces where he pitted big servers and fast CPUs against commodity hardware (ordinary machines you can buy everywhere). Moore's Law, (The number of transistors on circuits doubles every year) is applicable to many hardware components. Though still accurate, it is getting more and more expensive to double CPU speed. Increasing CPU speed is still possible, but at a price. The costs for scaling out a single server are generally higher than scaling up to multiple processors or servers. If we look solely at the speed of the CPU, we can conclude that the growth is flattening. Parallel computing is cheaper than scaling out single servers.

Looking back at the history of Windows Azure, Pat Helland actually stated that there should be something like low-cost, highly-available, high-bandwidth, high-storage, and high computing power-based datacenters, all around the world, that can run both existing and new applications.

Guess what? The concept envisioned was officially announced at PDC 2008! Windows Azure was born, and this very first release of the platform actually contained everything that was envisioned during this talk on LEAP 2007. Lots of cheap hardware runs in datacenters all around the globe that offer massive computing power, storage, and bandwidth. All these components are available like electricity; you start paying from the moment you start using it. Operational expenses (OpEx) instead of capital expenses (CapEx) enable you to experiment more easily, since you do not need to buy hardware but just take it from Windows Azure. When your experiment is successful and you need more computing power or storage to serve all your customers, you can easily scale up.

This book elaborates on different features from the Windows Azure platform. The central theme of the book is a fictitious company, Geotopia. This company decided to build its own social network by leveraging the abilities of the Windows Azure platform.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, The Concepts of Windows Azure, introduces Windows Azure, the cloud offering from Microsoft. It describes the author's first contact with thecloud in general and how Microsoft decided to put a great amount of effort into realizing Windows Azure.

Chapter 2, A Startup Scenario, shows how a brand new, ambitious company just opened its doors. Geotopia consists of enthusiastic developers and architects who jointly created a new view on social networking. It is not a basic user interface where plain text dominates but a compelling map interface, offering users the ability to treat it as their social canvas and drop video and images, and create messages based on their location or on the location of their interest. Users can recommend locations, shops, or other points of interest by adding comments or multimedia and tell their friends about it. This chapter describes the requirements for Geotopia.

Chapter3, Create Your Solution, teaches us how to create an organized Windows Azure solution with Visual Studio 2010. Both a web and a worker role are created together, with a Silverlight client acting as the Geotopia canvas, based on Bing Maps technology. We will also learn to run cloud projects locally on our own machine and debug them. As the last step, the initial solution is actually deployed to Windows Azure.

Chapter4, Storing Your Data, is a deep dive into the storage fundamentals of Windows Azure. It outlines the architecture of Windows Azure Storage and its underlying architecture. You will also learn how to operate the different Storage offerings, such as blobs, queues, and tables.

Chapter5, SQL Database, digs deeper into the scalable cloud database service that Microsoft offers and is a part of the Windows Azure platform. The chapter shows how to set up a SQL database and outlines best practices and guidelines. You will also learn how to fully leverage the power of Data Sync.

Chapter6, Key Features Explained, outlines different features from the platform (previously known as AppFabric). You will learn how to make use of Service Bus and how to enable messaging between your applications. Also, key features such as Caching, Windows Azure Connect, Access Control Service, and Windows Azure Traffic Manager are explained in detail, as is how you can benefit from them.

Chapter7, The Billing Aspects of Windows Azure, describes in great detail all the different billing aspects of Windows Azure. You will learn how the different components of the platform are charged and how you can get a good grip on the Windows Azure costs.

Chapter8, Windows Azure Patterns, provides a step-by-step walkthrough on how to make use of the Enterprise Library Integration Pack in your cloud services. It not only provides great detail on autoscaling and how to achieve this, but also drills down on transient fault handling and how to implement a gatekeeper pattern to enhance security in your cloud service.

Chapter9, Application Lifecycle Management, briefly explains Application Lifecycle Management in general and some specifics with respect to ALM on the Windows Azure Platform.

Chapter10, Windows Azure Security, explains how the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) is applicable for Windows Azure projects. The chapter also depicts some typical security features on the platform.

Chapter11, What's New in Windows Azure, contains a brief overview of new features of Windows Azure, released in June 2012.

What you need for this book

In order to run the code snippets given in the book, you will need:

Visual Studio 2010.

Windows Azure SDK, the latest version.

Access to Bing Maps and a valid account key. This can be retrieved from http://www.bingmapsportal.com.

Who this book is for

This book is for developers and architects who are experienced with Microsoft .NET technology and web technology in general, but may or may not be experienced with the latest version(s) of the .NET framework. Some general knowledge on cloud computing is preferred, but not mandatory.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: you need to run the following command: set-executionpolicy remotesigned

A block of code is set as follows:

While(true)

  {

    CloudQueueMessage message = queue.GetMessage();

    if(message != null)

    {

      //process it

      Process(message);

      Queue.DeleteMessage(message);

    }

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: By selecting a geotopic and clicking on Play this story, consecutive topics that are related to the selected ones will also be played chronologically.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

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Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Chapter 1. The Concepts of Windows Azure

The irresistible forces meet the movable objects.

—Pat Helland

In this chapter, we will provide an overview of Windows Azure and also briefly explain the history of the platform, why it was created, and why it is interesting and applicable for startup companies. We will also explore the evolution of Windows Azure from its early days back in 2008 right to where it is today. The internals of Windows Azure and the way Microsoft datacenters work will also be explained from a user experience perspective.